The present invention relates to the operation of automated systems that orchestrate the migration of computer-systems from one site or platform to another, and relates in particular to the orchestration of the data-migration portion of such migrations.
Migrating a set of computer resources, such as a data center or a set of Information Technology services used by a business function, may comprise moving large amounts of data, applications, volumes of storage, and other business elements from one physical or logical location to another. A data-migration portion of a system migration might, for example, comprise relocating employee data from the employees' notebook computers to a cloud-computing platform, moving data from one server farm to a second set of servers located in a different city, or migrating large transaction-processing systems from a physical infrastructure to a hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platform.
These migration efforts may be very complex, requiring a migration-planning application or tool to schedule resources, estimate hard costs, and generate project plans. One such class of automated tools is known in the industry as an orchestration mechanism. In a migration, orchestration may comprise the automated organization, scheduling, and management of computer systems, middleware and services before and during the actual migration process. In particular, orchestrating a migration effort may comprise: selecting and organizing tools, procedures, and architectural features required to perform required migration services; assembling and coordinating software and hardware components necessary to perform required migration services; and automating workflows necessary to deliver the required migration services.
For example, an orchestration mechanism might, in response to receiving information about a set of computing resources to be migrated, identify each migration service to be performed, determine the expense and time required to perform each migration service, select and organize the software and hardware components and resources required to perform each migration service, and then automating workflows required to deliver each migration service.
Today's system-migration orchestration mechanisms do a good job of estimating hard costs associated a migration, such as hardware purchase prices and software installation costs, especially when those hard costs are input by a user. They cannot, however, effectively estimate the feasibility of each migration subtask or the less-obvious “soft” costs associated with moving certain types of “hot” or sensitive data.
If, for example, government regulations or industry conventions require that enhanced security procedures be implemented to move a volume of sensitive data, the additional cost, resources, or time required for compliance is beyond the scope of existing data-migration orchestration tools. In another example, extrinsic or internal considerations may render some data infeasible to move, such as confidential medical records that are legally barred from being migrated to a lightly secured cloud platform. When “hot” data is frequently updated, additional expense may be incurred by additional tasks needed to ensure that the data remains current during the migration process. And if sensitive data is mingled with more readily movable data, such as when personal and business data coexist on a user's laptop hard drive, the hard drive may need to be “sanitized” by eliminating sensitive personal data prior to migration.
These problems are particularly significant in complex, large-scale migrations, where soft costs may comprise a large portion of total project costs, and where it is determined that a significant amount of data cannot be feasibly migrated. Current orchestration tools and applications thus fail to provide a nuanced, accurate estimate of the costs, resources, and time required to perform many migrations.
There is therefore a need for a way to improve migration-orchestration technologies to solve this technical problem in order to properly account for soft migration costs and infeasibilities.